Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday October 21, 2010 @11:05AM
from the thank-you-science dept.

Dog owners can sleep easy tonight because physicists have discovered how rapidly a wet dog should oscillate its body to dry its fur. Presumably, dogs already know. From the article: "Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the period of oscillation of the dogs' skin. For a labrador retriever, this turns out to be 4.3 Hz."

I had to give my dog baths all the time when I was a kid. Of course the first thing he would do is shake him self off once he was out of the bath. One time, out of curiosity, I stopped him mid-shake by holding the back part of his body (since the shake from head to tail). I held him for about a minute and then let him go. He finished his shake starting from the point he was at before I stopped him in the middle. Over the course of the ne

I find if I grab my dog at the shoulders and hold him still right as he's beginning his shake, I can stop it in much the same way you can stifle a sneeze. Not exactly a Stupid Pet Trick(TM) , but it comes in handy sometimes.

I've been laughing to the Igs for years. I'm making reference to the inspirational shoe-bomber, Richard Reed, who's non-exploding training shoes have since inspired a catalogue of imitators to throw footware at the rich, famous, evil and/ or retarded (or in the case of Dubya, all four with one shoe).

The formula is significant for us in the ad/entertainment industry who relies on algorithms to animate such motions. It sure beats trying to manually animating each fur (impossible), or coming up with a workaround that only approximates reality through trial and error. This will significantly reduce render times.

The same could be said about fluid dynamics a decade ago - now we can create whole above/underwater environments within the computer - saving time and cost of flooding entire soundstages.

Or you could just film a real dog or two that is similar to what you are animating.
The "researchers" didnt even come up with a good formula for predicting it based on dog size.
Probably because it varies for different breeds and what doggie chow he eats.

It might actually also be really damn useful to the textiles industry. If you can work out a formula that said "For a piece of cloth like this, you need to shake at (say) at x frequency for y minutes to dry", you could make drycleaning a much easier process. Theres a LOT of applications for this.

Ok, FTFA, it seems that the researchers did a very simplistic model and then found some videos so that they can measure what the animals actually do and noticed that they did not fit their model. So, nothing to see here until someone really sits down and models the wet dog oscillations with accuracy and tell us what the optimal frequency is (so that we can teach our dog if it is not that good with drying of course!).

Ok, FTFA, it seems that the researchers did a very simplistic model and then found some videos so that they can measure what the animals actually do and noticed that they did not fit their model. So, nothing to see here until someone really sits down and models the wet dog oscillations with accuracy and tell us what the optimal frequency is (so that we can teach our dog if it is not that good with drying of course!).

Nah, there are easier ways to get dry. My dog quickly moved from the "shake myself dry method" to the "the rug and furniture are my towel method".

She's found this to be truly superior although some preliminary research showing a combined "shake myself dry" followed by "the rug and furniture are my towel" method may be her best option.

When I told her to get off the couch she just grinned and said "I'm a bitch, deal with it."

My dog, at three months old, has adopted that same method, only he looks at me and says, deal with it, I'm a 3 pound bastard so you just try and stop me. He then runs all around the house like a maniac another couple of times rubbing against everything made of fabric.... I think it's probably his favorite thing to do. He looks and acts like he's having more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I don't think I could stop him with anything less than a.45.

After giving my dog baths for several years now, I'm convinced that her running around manic after a bath is not joy at being alive - it's joy at being out of the bath. However, at a bit heavier than three pounds, I can't afford to start giving her any room to argue the point if she wants to be somewhere I don't want her to be.

I should point out that Bear, my pup, only shakes and then runs around like a maniac after I've toweled him to a point of being mostly dry, and that he loves getting wrapped up in a towel to keep him warm and get the majority of the water out of his fur.

He does very similar things when he's playing with my wife and I too when he's really hyper. He'll run in circles around me, the living room, through the kitchen and back, just as hard as he can go, with his tail wagging like crazy and a look of pure bliss

I tried replacing the "the rug and furniture are my towel method" with the "insert into the microwave method"and did not turn out too well, I was wanting to save money on towels and now instead I am saving money on dog food.

Seems like there would be a _minimum_ shaking velocity of the fur itself, just to dislodge the water. Anything faster than that would also work, but expend more energy.

You also have to take into account the fact that with each oscillation, the dog's trunk reaches some maximum stretch limit, at which time muscles in the reverse direction kick in and make them go the other way. But the maximum velocity would be reached somewhere near the middle of an oscillation.

What possible application could this research be for? In what way does this benefit mankind, expand out understanding of the universe, or improve the Human Condition. And perhaps the most important question, what moron paid for this? Please tell me it wasn't taxpayer money, because then technically I am one of the morons, and I don't very much appreciate it!

It's a research group at a University who focuses on performing simple, cheap, tabletop experiments. It's run by one of the professors at the University and most of the physicists appear to actually be students. Andrew Dickerson is a Grad student whose specialty in the lab is "Animal Cleaning", so it stands to reason that he might have become interested in wet dogs shaking and ta

While I'm not an expert, I speculate that potential applications would include: using a similar model to study cilial action in human lungs or gut; developing of advanced fabrics which shed water more efficiently; developing algorithms for robotics (I'm thinking in particular military applications) to dry themselves in the wild. The beauty of science to me is that someone answers what appears to be a relatively innocuous and useless question and often can't tell where it might lead. We (often) can't just d

If they're scientists rather than engineers, the obvious answer is, "Who cares?"... Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of "science" is that it's a search for knowledge for its own sake, not tied to a practical application. Engineering research is generally tied to something practical. Scientific research need not be. That's not to say that scientists never take up research that has practical application, just that the mindset of a scientist is that the practical application isn't the ultimate goal: the knowledge itself is. If you're curious about dog-fur-shaking, research it. That's science.

That said, the dynamics of water droplets on fibrous materials probably aren't well understood, given that there are open questions about the dynamics of liquid films on some solid surfaces [1], and there are numerous applications that could be imagined there - filters, absorptive mats, perhaps new methods of creating sprays using some sort of shaking synthetic fibers, etc. If we only studied the questions for which the technological benefit was directly obvious, we'd still be in the pre-industrial era. I don't know if this particular study was well-designed or will provide useful information, but any knowledge has potential to prove valuable, often in areas not directly related to the question that was being studied initially. These studies may sound silly when explained superficially, but that doesn't mean they're worthless.

[1]The breakup and atomization of the shear-driven fuel film on an intake valve at cold start in a PFI gasoline engine, for example, depends on whether the film will separate from the valve surface when it reaches the corner, or flow around the corner and down the side. This is a relatively simple problem, geometrically, but the interplay of surface tension, viscosity, inertia, and the boundary with the air flow is something that current models really didn't handle at all until a year or two ago - the experimental side of the project is something that a couple of the MS students in my research group were working on while I was in grad school. Something as complicated as how the effect of the frequency of the oscillations of the underlying layer to which fibers are attached affects the behavior of droplets clinging to those fibers is more complex, and thus I would guess it's most likely not understood well at all at the level of being able to explain and model it in detail.

It's just a mass on a spring, so I assume sqrt(k/m) is a pretty good approximation. We'll need a pretty good sample size to determine k to a reasonable level of precision though. I'll work on collecting data, can you write up the grant proposal?

We have two dogs: a sparsely haired Chinese Crested and a rather fuzzy Bichon cross. They are about the same Sd (dog shake diameter) but we have been bothered for a long time by the dissonance created by the subtle difference in their Fd (dog shake frequency). The resulting low frequency rumble has attracted what we thought were "Graboids" but in reality were just large, obnoxious, pocket gophers. Time to reach for the Rodenator.

Thanks to this article, we have successfully brought them into tune with ea

But I do remember that Richard Feynman wrote a paper on the wobbling movement of a spinning plate. He did this because he was depressed and had scientific writer's block. And nobody would deny the importance of his later work.

Science is science. If what they find is correct in the scientific sense, it really doesn't bother me too much.

I'd be worried if scientists started really competing for the Ig Nobel prizes. But I doubt that they ever will:-).

This is a graduate student doing some "tabletop science" in the lab. His specialty in the lab is "Animal Cleaning" http://www.me.gatech.edu/hu/Research/lab.html [gatech.edu] . I doubt he's trying for anything except his thesis.

I'd say he did a pretty good job building a preliminary predictive model and testing against that model and refining it. And it stands to reason that animals shaking water out of their fur might be of interest to him, since he probably bathes animals on a pretty regular basis and observes the

In fact, I believe one of this year's Nobel physics laureates, Andre Geim, who won for his work related to graphene (the graphite-sheet-like carbon form that's all the research rage right now) has also previously received an IgNobel award.

Specifically for levitating a frog using magnetic fields.

Research can have some humor in it, and sometimes mixing the trivial with the serious helps get you through an otherwise boring day.

To all who criticize the money spent on this research: Do you really think we ever can or should stop a question from being answered? Are not scientists in their position because at some point they were curious about the world and went about getting educated in skillfully pursuing answers?
I think in this case a simple question was answered and presented decently with the first empirical data. Next, they can dig out a theoretical model that fit the observed data. If they struggle finding a good theoretical

OK, but can we please spend the money on more beneficial questions?How about "Why do so many men enjoy watching Girl on Girl porn? If we could get a meaningful answer to that, men all over the world could say something like:"Honey, don't do it for me, do it for my under stimulated Limbic system. Think of Cheri here as a therapist of sorts. Besides, I have a note from my Doctor (along with his video camera)... and there is a scientific study to back this all up."

These scientists must be getting bored believing that random data will help some future discovery.
My dog, Nikita, hates the water; but she loves to eat watermelon and wear her favorite large dog clothes [clothes4largedogs.com].